15 Shocking Facts and Figures About Contamination Around The Globe

Hundreds of Thousands, Millions… Yet Most People Pretend Like Everything is OK

Facts and figures always paint a vivid picture about realities that most can easily understand. Whilst some estimates can in fact be higher or lower, the general overview is bad enough.

“Whether one is a student, a scientist, a stay at home mum, a startup founder, self-made entrepreneur or CEO of a large corporation, contamination is an issue that everyone must become aware of and begin to address”, says the author of ‘The Contamination Report‘.

Adding that “Be it the chemical toxins found in the food we eat or the nuclear waste that may take thousands of years to decompose, contamination around the globe is posing a danger to our very existence.”

The Facts Speak for Themselves: We are Killing Ourselves

We picked 15 shocking facts and figures that provide an insight into the madness of contamination around the globe:

Ships and cruise ships are also major sea pollutants, responsible for the deaths of some 60,000 people every year.

“A minimum of 5.25 trillion [plastic] particles weighing 268,940 tons” are currently floating in our oceans, suggests a study by researchers from the US, France, Chile, Australia and New Zealand … There’s much more plastic pollution out there than recent estimates suggest…”

At least “46 million Americans are drinking water contaminated with trace amounts of pharmaceuticals.”

An estimated 69% of Indians still lack access to improved sanitation facilities. Of the 2.4 (other sources: 2.5) billion people in the world that defecate openly, some 665 million live in India.

Contaminated water kills 25,000 people every day around the globe, and each year some 20 million children are impaired by undernourishment. Calculation: 25,000 x 365 = 9,125,000 people killed p.a. from contaminated water.

Power plants that generate electricity cause about 3,500 lung cancer cases and over 35,000 heart attacks and this is just in the United States on a yearly basis.

In one Indian river 90 different pharmaceutical elements have been found, from pharmaceutical companies dumping their waste in the river.

In the United States, beekeepers are experiencing unprecedented die-offs of bees, some losing as much as 80% of their colonies. Commercial beekeepers in twenty-two states have reported deaths of tens of thousands of honeybee colonies.

Each day, 2 million tons of toxic waste is dumped in to our rivers and seas, 22 million tons of oil extracted and 100 million tons of greenhouse gases are released.

More than 14 billion pounds of garbage are dumped into the ocean every year.

Household waste is set to soar from its current 1.3 billion tons to 2.2 billion by 2025.

Depending on forecasted scenarios by 2100 only 18 – 45 of today’s rainforests would still exist.

Some 600 million people fall ill each year from eating contaminated food, and 420,000 die, including 125,000 children, according to the World Health Organization.

The above is just a very small portion of the hundreds of facts and figures revealed by ‘The Contamination Report‘, a publication that provides an in-depth look at possibly one of the most pressing issues facing mankind today – contamination.

Yet, most are too preoccupied with insignificant daily realities, failing to realize that their future and that of their children is at stake. Are we really that shortsighted?